The service he could do to the cause of religion had been through
life the ground he alleged to himself for his choice of action:
it had been the motive which he had poured out in his prayers.
Who would use money and position better than he meant to use them?
Who could surpass him in self-abhorrence and exaltation of God's cause?
And to Mr. Bulstrode God's cause was something distinct from his own
rectitude of conduct: it enforced a discrimination of God's enemies,
who were to be used merely as instruments, and whom it would be
as well if possible to keep out of money and consequent influence.
Also, profitable investments in trades where the power of the prince
of this world showed its most active devices, became sanctified by a
right application of the profits in the hands of God's servant.
This implicit reasoning is essentially no more peculiar to evangelical
belief than the use of wide phrases for narrow motives is peculiar
to Englishmen. There is no general doctrine which is not capable
of eating out our morality if unchecked by the deep-seated habit
of direct fellow-feeling with individual fellow-men.
But a man who believes in something else than his own greed,
has necessarily a conscience or standard to which he more or less
adapts himself. Bulstrode's standard had been his serviceableness
to God's cause: "I am sinful and nought--a vessel to be consecrated
by use--but use me!"--had been the mould into which he had constrained
his immense need of being something important and predominating.
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